The solar sector posted a 5.4% growth in employment in 2021 despite the Covid-19 pandemic and federal trade policy and supply chain challenges, easily outpacing gains of 4% in the US energy sector and 2.8% across the wider national economy year-on-year, according to a new report by the Department of Energy (DoE).
Solar added jobs faster than other renewable energy generation sources such as wind (2.9%), bioenergy (2.9%), geothermal (2.8%), and hydro (2.2%). Nuclear energy jobs declined 4.2%, while those for fossil energy either declined or showed marginal growth.
The DOE’s US Energy & Employment Report 2022 also found that more than three million jobs, 40% of the US total in the energy sector, support activities that “align” with President Joe Biden’s goal of a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.
DoE defines those areas as jobs related to biofuels; grid technologies and storage; hydrogen fuel cell, plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles and components; nuclear energy; renewable energy, and traditional transmission and distribution.
“DoE’s USEER report shows that jobs critical to our clean energy transition are on the rise and poised for continued expansion,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
The report covers five major energy industries: electric power generation, energy efficiency, fuels, motor vehicles, and transmission, distribution, and storage. Total jobs in those sectors increased last year to 7.8 million from 7.5 million in 2020.
Solar energy companies, which include mainly photovoltaics but also concentrating solar power (CSP), employed 333,887 workers in 2021 with 173,283 in construction, then professional services (52,466), manufacturing (43,091), wholesale trade and transport (27,166), and utilities (6,132). There were also 31,749 jobs in “other services,” which the report does not define.
The preponderance of workers in construction, more than four times the number in manufacturing, partly reflecting the sector’s heavy dependence on imports. Southeast Asian nations alone supply about 80% of panels imported by the US which installed almost 24GW of solar capacity in 2021.
The US, in contrast, manufactured about 4.8GW of panels last year but imported much of the polysilicon and some of the wafers to do this.
With much fanfare earlier this month, President Joe Biden announced he was invoking the wartime Defence Production Act to boost domestic panel manufacturing capacity by roughly 1GW per year over the next decade. It later emerged that Congress has not appropriated funding for the loans and grants that DOE is hoping to disburse to the private sector for that purpose.
Even if module supply improves, which is likely after the Biden administration recently imposed a 24-month moratorium on potential duties on imports from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, hiring workers for new construction here won’t be easy, according to the report.
More than 93% of employers queried by DoE reported some difficulty finding qualified new workers to help construct solar projects and 40% said it is “very difficult.”
The report did not detail the reasons, but they include competition from other industries for the limited number of skilled workers, wage levels, and uncertain federal tax and trade policies that cast a cloud over the industry’s future growth, making it less attractive as a career in some cases.
Wind industry employment rose 2.9% in 2021 to 120,164 with 119,287 in onshore wind-related activities and the rest in offshore wind, which is poised for explosive growth later this decade. Biden has set a 30GW by 2030 target for offshore wind versus 42MW in operation now.
As with solar, construction had the highest percentage of companies reporting hiring difficulty, with 98% of respondents indicating it was “very difficult” or “somewhat difficult” to find workers for wind.
